In Jimmy McDonough's entertaining, if overstuffed, biography, Russ Meyer is compared to such directors as Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, David Cronenberg, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. And that's just in the first seven pages. All this for a man who once described his cinematic vision by saying: "I don't pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist. Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building, and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blond, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician. Films should run like express trains!"

Meyer's did -- to the extent that they almost always derailed. As McDonough points out, the titles of more than half a dozen of Meyer's films end with an exclamation point (these include "Europe in the Raw!" "Good Morning ... and Goodbye!" and "Up!"); the film for which he's best known boasts three: "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" But what was he so excited about? Anyone who has ever watched a Meyer film knows the answer: breasts. Enormous breasts. Breasts that McDonough refers to as "huge, unbelievable, sometimes scary appendages ... female superstructures that defied reality."

Meyer's obsession is a fact duly noted in the titles of some of the many biographies already published on the auteur: "The Very Breast of Russ Meyer"; "Lips, Hips, Tits, Power"; and "A Clean Breast," Meyer's own three-volume, 1, 213-page illustrated memoir, in which he details his every sexual conquest but barely touches upon his inner life. Although "Big Bosoms, Square Jaws" describes longingly, and in great detail, the Brobdingnagian attributes of Meyer's many starlets, McDonough's book is primarily a portrait of a man of monstrous ambitions and crippled emotions whose films, for a fleeting moment, propelled the American zeitgeist with vivid, bombastic splendor.

Russell Albion Meyer was born in East Oakland in 1922, two weeks before his parents divorced. His mother, who seemed to suffer from mental illness, floated between jobs and apartments during the Depression. Meyer relied on her terribly. According to Tura Satana, the star of "Faster, Pussycat!," "he said he breast-fed til he was three."

As a teen, Meyer ushered at the Fox Oakland Theater and carried mattresses for a department store ("kind of a curious connection there," he once noted) while discovering strippers at the President Follies, a San Francisco burlesque house on McAllister Street. In 1944, he was appointed staff sergeant with the 166th Signal Photographic Company, where he made friendships that would last his entire life; many of the men of the 166th would later appear in and help produce his films. During the war, he took combat photographs and shot newsreel footage, often at dangerous proximity to the battles. His war experience served as his film school. After the war, he would employ the same aggressive, commando-style filmmaking techniques in his own films. Charles Napier, an actor who appeared in many of Meyer's films, once said that "working with Russ Meyer was like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse."

Meyer's filmmaking career followed the same trajectory as the sex film industry as a whole, and at several points along the way it was his films that brought about the industry's transformation. As McDonough writes, Meyer brought "increasingly higher budgets, a new level of technical sophistication, and a high-profile presence to the exploitation business."

With his first film, "The Immoral Mr. Teas" (1959), Meyer inaugurated the "nudie-cutie" genre -- quaint, bumbling comedies with plots that featured no sex but allowed for numerous gratuitous shots of topless women -- a scandalous development at the time. After five nudie-cuties, Meyer moved on to black-and-white "roughies," films in which he mingled ever-larger breasts and actual sex with violence (usually inflicted by his large-breasted heroines, and sometimes by the breasts themselves); this period produced "Faster, Pussycat!," which follows the bloody adventures of three cackling bisexual go- go dancers in the Mojave Desert.

In the late 1960s, bizarre sex romps like "Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers" and "Vixen" attracted huge mainstream audiences and serious critical appraisal. This led to a contract with Fox Films for the picture Meyer considered his masterpiece (and most critics considered an abomination), "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls."

One of the critics who had begun to take Meyer seriously was Roger Ebert. Ebert had written a letter in Meyer's defense to the Wall Street Journal after it published a piece calling Meyer "King Leer." Meyer invited Ebert to Hollywood; soon afterward, Ebert was at work writing the script for "Dolls," a film he would describe as: "a camp sexploitation horror musical that ends in a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding."

It's as misleading to talk of a Meyer masterpiece as it is to rate any of his films failures. It is hard to watch a Meyer film in a single sitting -- one recalls Alex's torture in "A Clockwork Orange" -- but any single scene will highlight the qualities that made him a pop visionary.

When Meyer hit his stride in the late 1960s, he had ushered in a new filmmaking style, one that would come to dominate pop culture: bright colors, lightning-fast cuts, extreme close-ups (usually of jiggling flesh), nonsense plots and nonsensical dialogue, set to a rock soundtrack, creating a strange but playful atmosphere punctuated by extravagant violence and carnivorous sex.

McDonough is right to trace Meyer's influence to John Waters, MTV and Quentin Tarantino -- but he could have gone further, to advertising, reality television and much of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

Meyer died in 2004 of pneumonia after a long decline into dementia. But his films, no doubt, will remain influential. As Meyer himself said, "My films are like a reptile you beat with a club. You think you've killed it, but then it turns around and gets you on the ankle."